2/09/2007 @ 12:00PM

The Most Expensive Cities For A First Date

Less than a week after Superbowl Sunday, residents of Evansville, Ind.–located just 181 miles southwest of Indianapolis, home of the newly crowned National Football League champions–have stopped celebrating the Colts’ victory. With Mardi Gras less than two weeks away, the city’s bars and restaurants have bigger King Cakes to fry.

“We’ve got one of the biggest Mardi Gras parties outside of New Orleans to get ready for,” says Louis Krugel, a bartender at Ginny’s Place in downtown Evansville. If last year is any indication, Ginny’s Place expects standing-room-only crowds of 300 people for Cajun food, dancing and karaoke each night of Mardi Gras. “Oh, honey, we party all the way through,” says Krugel.

OK, so maybe a Mardi Gras free-for-all isn’t the best venue for landing your own honey. But there are other ways to sow the seeds of love in Evansville, which ranked No. 19 on our list of the most expensive cities for going on a first date. Take the town’s week-long summer Freedom Festival, with air shows, hydroplane racing and fireworks. And in October, residents indulge in deep-fried cow-brain sandwiches, chocolate-covered grasshoppers and fried Oreos at the West Side Nut Club’s Fall Festival. If your date’s of the gambling persuasion, casinos on the Ohio River offer a chance to lose your money–and your heart–year-round.

To determine our list, we ranked more than 200 cities (minimum population: 100,000) in the continental U.S. using a proprietary index based on the latest pricing data from the Council for Community and Economic Research in Arlington, Va. In many cases, the results are not what you’d expect.

We tallied the average costs of some key elements of a first date: alcohol (specifically, a 1.5 liter bottle of Livingston Cellars, Gallo Chablis or Chenin Blanc wine), food (a 11- to 12-inch pizza from Pizza Hut), entertainment (an evening movie ticket), grooming (a barbershop visit), suiting up (a dry-cleaning bill) and transportation (price per gallon of gasoline). All categories were weighted equally (though price differences in barbershop visits and dry cleaning tended to be greater than those in gas and pizza). Finally–call us old-fashioned–we assumed that the guy pays, hence the barbershop visit instead of a trip to the beauty salon.

Now, Pizza Hut (or Gallo, for that matter) may not make the hottest impression on a first date. However, to keep the data as uniform as possible, we avoided putting a price on an “average” restaurant in each city, which would skew the data as the numbers get high in a hurry relative to the other costs. (By Zagat’s count, the average New York City restaurant bill for two came in around $40, about 17% above the national average of $32.50.) A snazzy restaurant might not be the way to go anyway, says Evan Marc Katz, a Los Angeles-based dating consultant. “Coffee seems cheap and impersonal, and dinner seems static and formal” for a first date, he says. “Men are much more impressed with fancy dinner than woman are.”

While New York City (Manhattan) clocked the highest average price for both a movie (at $10.44 per ticket) and wine ($10.86 per bottle), Stamford, Conn., stole top overall honors on our list. Newark, N.J., was second, thanks to an average haircut price of $19.25, versus $11.34 for No. 20 Dayton, Ohio. New York City came in third. At $12.09, pizza was dearest in San Francisco, propelling it to the No. 4 slot overall.

Not surprisingly, several California cities made the top 25, though Los Angeles (No. 11) and San Diego (No. 12) rank lower than Hartford, Conn. (No. 8) and New Haven, Conn. (No. 7). Despite its smallish population (120,000), Evansville tops bigger metropolises like Miami, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C. And while they don’t exactly live in a fashion hub, Evansville Lotharios pay more to look good (haircuts, dry cleaning) on average than their counterparts in many larger towns.

Looking for the cheapest first date you can find? In 12 cities, mainly in the Midwest, White Castle will be rolling out the red carpet with its second annual Valentine’s Day promotion, complete with candlelit dining, private-table service and hostess seating.

Or just head down to Laredo, Texas (pop.: 200,000), the cheapest city on our list. Order up some barbecue, throw back a few Shiner Bocks and call it a night.